Dev Corner

1. EMBRACE YOUR INNER PESSIMIST...

This doesn't mean you can't be your usual, happy-go-lucky self! In fact, it's absolutely vital that you approach any project with a healthy 'yes we can' attitude.

If you've used a web ontology before, or any other large-scale data repository, you're likely familiar with one of the chief concerns facing anyone in such a position: how do you get your data into the system? Moreover, how do you get large amounts of data into the system with (relative) ease? And if you've used a content management system before, you've likely faced a similar, albeit inverted problem: how do you get your data out?

If you can accomplish these preliminary items without a good deal of effort, you're finally left with the task of transforming the data from one, and allowing it to be recognizable by the other.

If, instead, you haven't used either of these, you're likely wondering why on Earth you would want to.

At Freelock we're in the midst of building dashboards for ourselves and for customers, to really dial in our process and let us know where to focus our improvements.

At Freelock, we've been adopting a pattern for git branch management called Git Flow. If you haven't run across git flow before, go check out this article to get the basic concepts: A successful Git branching model.

As part of our recent site upgrade from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7, we had a bunch of content profiles to clean up.

There's a huge range of skills that come to mind when somebody asks for a web developer, and when you start looking for Drupal developers, it gets even more complicated.

Drupal developer, module developer, back end developer, what does that mean?

In the world of software and web development simplicity is a funny thing. We are always striving to make our work and our product simple: simple to understand, simple to use, and simple to maintain. This is one of the many reasons we use Drupal as our development framework here at Freelock.

Over the past couple weeks, I've updated the Drupal Dojo Toolkit module to support the new AMD module layout and asynchronous loading.

Via the Seattle Tech Startups list, I came across probably the most vehement, well-written, detailed critique of the PHP language I have seen yet.

The rest of my team may not agree with me, but I greatly prefer the Dojo Toolkit to jQuery, when it comes to Javascript libraries. Why? Perhaps it's because I want to justify the hundreds of hours I've spent learning and re-learning the API as it continues to evolve.